Ink and Sallow
by ChemicalCucum
Summary: She visits him as he wished, but not as he expected. Baek/Jun.


**Ink and Sallow**

**AN**: Sequel to _A Secret Place_; takes place right after the events of that story. Just a lil' Valentine horror for my OTP. Were _A Secret Place_ was sweet, light and family orientated this is creepy, dark and sensual (At least I hope it is?). I wanted to reflect both aspects of Jun's personality in writing in respect to this pairing.

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In murky darkness his heart ached with memory; more at peace and comfort with his life and pains than before. His excursion had been a healing unguent, the truth open and out with no more secrets.

He sat alone in the familiar comfort of his living room, his exhausted student sound asleep in heavy slumber upstairs, wrapped in a tangle of sheets and red hair, silly and clueless; he had put the ordeal out of mind, figuring it best to let his Master close his heart again in peace.

But his heart was open, still burning with the thoughts of her. He had looked into the face of her progeny just hours previous and had seen _her_ smile, the arch of her brow, the glint of her eyes. Before his vision the son melted away to reveal the smiling face of her; the vision pained him still.

He supposed his inability to stop feeling the pain of her absence was a weakness, but he relished it almost. At times like these he caroused in it; caught up in a miasma of swirling ivory skirts and flower petals, flickers of raven hair and bird feathers.

With every part of him he would always want her. Never having loved and been loved as he had with her. She burnt through his heart with the gentleness of a spring breeze in lush, rain-dusted woods and had left a hole in the shape of her in his heart.

Perhaps the pining and aching and all the hopeless wishes to just see her one last time, just to know what happened to her and to know that she was at peace was a hopeless waste of energy and emotion, but she was worth every second of it. But now, he supposed it was the time to finally let her go, to move on past her in the knowledge that she lived on in Jin Kazama and that there was peace to be had in that thought.

It was with these thoughts now that he sat in the dark, safe and secure, the silence around him a mere blanket, coating the inner workings of his heart. But something gave him pause, a tremor in the air, something that was not there a moment before; he pulled his head up from where it faced the floor, looking around the room.

In the gloom everything was covered in ink, still and silent and so altogether normal, but something, _something_ was off, something was not normal. For the briefest of alarming moments, Baek found himself caught in the memory of Ogre, his defeat and near death at the hands of that monster playing by in the blink of an eye. The air had trembled the same way, that familiar oppression in the air becoming suddenly apparent with the realisation.

But to his surprise, the subjugation of the air was not one of fear and anxiety, not completely anyway. He glanced around the room with quick eyes, twitching from where he sat, wound-up like a deer ready to leap and remove himself from whatever it was in the air; above him Hwoarang soundly slept, oblivious.

He sprung up, standing in the centre of the room, his body tense and trembling, so aware of another presence in the room that his previous thoughts were cast aside, momentarily forgotten in the tentative feeling of defence. Breathless and startled, a vein of ice tore through his body, starting from the base of his spine upward through his neck, chilling his bones, his heart stopping in his chest, a vicious shudder passing through his form, leaving him in a weak daze.

At the corner of his vision he could discern the previous ink of the darkness moving: oily tendrils wavering and melting like heat in the air, the delicate ripples filling the air like smoke and coming to cross over his eyes, faintly purple in the gloom.

"I heard you, I heard you calling from beyond the abyss."

Time froze and for agonising seconds Baek could not think, frozen and yet moving with incredible shudders of life and shock and disbelief. That voice, so smooth and delicate behind an oily lilt; it couldn't be...

"I wanted to see you again, Baek."

There was the faintest of touches on his shoulder. A hand? Fingers? The touch was so cold, so alien and unwarm that Baek felt himself stumble forward, a small gasp on his lips, his mind completely blank and unable to comprehend his dire situation. All reason said not to move, not to turn and to look upon whatever cold horror it was standing behind him, taunting him with that voice.

She was gone, dead and never to grace his vision with smiles and his ears with laughter. Despite all the wishes of his heart and yearnings just to see her face again, he knew it was a fantasy; she was gone forever, like his father before him was gone. No desperate yearnings and endless crying in the dead hours of the black nights would ever bring either back. That was why he had resolved to move on and just as he was about to do so, this mockery.

But he found his body twisting against his better judgement. The smallest flicker of hope and curiosity sweeping over his reason like leaves in the wind, so gentle and yet so very there, so beautiful in its unpretentiousness that he could not help but allow his body to be pulled along with the flow.

Slow motion coated his senses like tar, the room abnormally defined and distinct in the dark, his heart in his stomach.

Before him, he espied in the corner of the room by the door a woman standing with arms folded, as naked as the day of her birth, shrouded in agitated blackness that sashayed and swirled before her as ink in the air, melting before the bright carmine yellow glow of her eyes.

It couldn't be...

It wasn't...

"Baek."

Was it?

He could not speak, the world falling away with only the image of her before him: like her but not her. She regarded him with tawny eyes, the expression behind them indiscernible, her lips accentuated in the blue of the night, the same firm lips that were like hers. Faint tails of black hair ran down her brow, framed her cheeks and swayed at her shoulders; her skin was the purest of alabaster. Baek found himself plunged into a memory of her as she rose from their connubial bed, hair splayed in matted patches with mess and frizz, looking so very lovely and beautiful.

Slowly the form before him unfolded her arms, resting them on either side of her shapely hips, the movement so graceful and familiar. The ink around her continued to swirl in the air like disturbed smoke, pulling along with her movements. For a stupid moment Baek could not help wondering why the smoke was so distinct in the darkness.

There was a hitch at her shoulders, the slightest of tilts at her head and altogether her expression changed, her whole demeanour sank and melted and Baek knew just then that this was real, that he hadn't fallen into lunacy and the being before him was indeed _her_. In the darkness he found his voice, but he wasn't so sure he truly spoke her name with those rasping words that were deaf to his own ears.

"...Jun?"

"I've missed you, Baek."

To hear her voice, now so apparently the voice of Jun Kazama, his one and only, the woman he had mourned and cried and begged out for over years of agonising unknown, it was magic. All his desires came to the forefront of his mind, all the feelings of warm days in forests and smiles and laughter like bell chimes crashed over his heart and mind, bringing him to his knees with a painful impact upon the floor, his eyes never leaving that beautifully strange demonic face before him.

She was here, here! After all the wishing and dreaming and writhing in the coils of deepest, agonised desire, ready to let go and give up his hopeless reverie, she was here again as he wished.

But not as he expected her to be.

As his knees slammed into the floor, as his arms fell limp at his sides in desperate benediction before his light and life, he drew back, suddenly horrified by the sight of her. His knees compacted against something damp. He eyes fell to the floor and he was suddenly aware of just why the room had appeared so oily in the dark: an oozing fluid coated the floor, spread over the furniture and walls in sticky, dripping tendrils like a viscous mould of tar.

The same substance coated her naked form, covering her breasts and vulva in a mockery of modesty, coated her arms and legs like torn and welted gloves, clung to her stomach and shoulders like a sultry disease; in his wonder he had not noticed its presence.

"Jun?"

He found his voice again, speaking her name again; the name was tenuous and frightened, confused and desperate. What was wrong? Oh what was wrong with her!?

Her eyes narrowed slightly in the dark, her lips moving so slightly that he would have missed it had he not been transfixed on her damnably beautiful and sombre face. She inclined her head, body arching with a movement like oil, looking into his eyes with an emotion he could not place in his terror.

"I wanted to see you again, Baek."

A repeat of her earlier statement; and this time her voice was warm, gentle and tender, the voice he recognised so well behind the water of her speech. Still his terror of her prevented response, so grieved at the sight of her sickness and deformity, her difference, her _otherness_.

"Please don't...please don't fear me."

Her gentle, pleading whisper crushed his heart in a grip of iron. He choked and gasped and fell back on his rear, unable to main balance on his knees before her.

"You...you can't be Jun. You're so..."

"Different? Disgusting?"

Baek could neither approve nor disapprove of her words, so stricken by her difference and state of being. He could no longer tell if the woman before him truly was a woman, let alone the woman he wanted so dearly, or if she was a nightmare, a spectre or demon come to torment him whilst wearing her face.

"Baek, I've missed you. I wanted to see you again. Please don't...don't run away from me."

Again her voice was so weak and vulnerable he almost couldn't believe it belonged to the ghoulish woman before him. She was beautiful, but her very essence, her presence before him was so inhuman he couldn't stand it.

"What are you?"

His breath was a silent staccato and his question caused a grimace of pain to cross her delicate, twisted face, the slightest pang of guilt crossing his chest at the sight of it.

"It's me, Jun."

"…how? What-?"

"I died. But death could not hold me."

The matter-of-fact tone, the simplistic way in which she presented the information almost caused Baek to laugh with a mixture of hysteria and joy. She was back from beyond the grave, a verified zombie and yet…and yet he could accept it. If he truly were mad, his only consideration was for why he had not been aware of it until just this moment, why if his grief over the years regarding her had not manifested itself in recurrent visitations of ink and sallow; it was the only reason he could accept the reality of his current situation.

"As for how, Ogre, the same as you except..." she trailed off, her face taunt with concentration as if she was considering her next words carefully, "Except I would not stand for it. It wouldn't get what it had come for, it could not have _him_."

"I don't understand..."

Baek breathed the words, altogether not concerned with the information at the present moment, lost in the sight of her, his heart clenched in such terror and rhapsody with his eyes trapped in the vision of her beautiful face of tainted porcelain and lilac.

"It does not matter; all you need to know is that for years I have sat in purgatory, but your heart reached me. I heard you call for me from the deepest parts and I've come."

Could he truly believe this? That his desires and yearnings and wishes had called her back from beyond the grave? That their love transcended the veil of death and was strong enough to reunite them in agony over one another? It was insane; there was no possible way...

"Cease your thoughts Baek; I cannot be with you for too long."

Her face was the one he remembered so well. All her clandestine inkiness had folded away to reveal her tender whiteness, her eyes faintly brown behind the citrine that glared out, revealing all the love and tenderness he remembered. Her delicate lips were the pink he recalled so well and his urge to reach out and take those lips in his own momentarily broke through his barrier of fear.

"But you're frightened of me, aren't you?" She lamented, kneeling down before him, her beautiful body twisting into delicate curves that Baek found himself admiring; with the sweep of her hips and thighs there was the smallest of hungers before his eyes locked back to hers, drinking in that familiar softness.

"Yes Baek, I am different to how I was, but know that my heart is still with you. I have wanted you as you've wanted me, for so long..."

Her voice took on a tone that he did not recognise as she spoke, at least not in relation to her. It was deeper, sultry...pleading. Even in their most intense and desperate unions her voice remained soft and delicate, the pleading more the energised submission to his hands than the demanding and assertive seduction that laced her words now; it only frightened him further.

"Baek...I need you. I need you again..."

Her voice was velveteen and sexual, filled with a barely contained animalism that was unbecoming of the Jun he knew. He stumbled back on hands and knees, barely able to comprehend the feelings that shot through his body at the sight and sound of her. He wanted Jun, with her sweet, airy and delicately feminine sexuality, not this...unknown, who wore her face and spoke with passion, intensity and lust; the change of her tone was horrifying.

"Jun, what is wrong with you!?"

Again he wasn't sure he had spoken, his body so frozen with dismay as it was. 'Jun' slowly leaned forward, resting her hands on the floor, ink dripping from the subtle joints of her fingers, pooling on the floor. She rose onto her knees, the movement so silky that Baek was transfixed, the rise of her hips tantalisingly inviting; she watched him on hands and knees, almost as if she was ready to pounce upon him; he was suddenly torn between fear, shock and desire.

"I am me, but...different," her voice was so husky that it made his head spin, her lips suddenly gleaming in the dark, moving with each syllable as if in slow motion, her tongue moving luxuriously behind pearly teeth.

"Please don't run from me. I just want to hold you again, Baek."

Something about the way she spoke his name this time caused the Korean to visibly shudder, feeling his temperature increase under the sudden tightness of his collar; Jun's eyes were heavy with filthy intention.

"This isn't you Jun, whatever has happened this...this is not you," Baek seemed to say it, but not wholly convinced of the truth of the statement himself.

Jun simply smiled and it was wicked and devilish and so unlike her true saccharine demeanour, the one he fell in love with, that he felt sick and so, so shamefacedly aroused by it.

"This is me Baek, this is _all_ me."

Her hand shot out with a flurry of smoke and ink, resting against the clammy skin of her lover's cheek, the touch every bit as cold and burning as it had been before. Baek cried out, the sound choked and halfway between shock and pleasure. It hurt, it set his nerves on fire, yet the touch was so _hot_ and sensuous, awakening the deepest of base feelings inside his stomach. He melted at her fingertips, the fear that froze him melting into trembling blood.

"I need you…"

He felt his lips move in sync with her words, transfixed by her mouth, hypnotised by the carmine yellow of her eyes, falling more and more under her spell and growing weaker in resistance, his body reacting to her touches against his diminishing will.

He felt her fingertips trace the buttons of his waist coat, each one coming undone like the reason of his mind, falling open and exposed before her, the contents spilling forth: need, desire, longing. Joy and euphoria all chaotically mixed up with disbelief, horror and disgust. His mind would not accept it, not the woman before him, the woman who wore the face of Jun Kazama yet was so obviously _not_ Jun Kazama: this vixen, this siren, this unknown.

Yet he melted into her, the cold air hitting the exposed skin of his toned chest, his shirt pulled open as Jun's hands came over him, caressing the tense, strongly defined muscles of his sides, his stomach, his chest and shoulders. She was pressed against him, the weight of her breasts at his abdomen and the cold burn flooding his veins causing his head to fall back, completely unable to fight the waves of desire washing over him as they invaded his body through the ghostly woman's ministrations.

"Baek, I need you to touch me, please..."

Her words were laced with a high-pitched desperation, her hands clamped onto his shoulders, her chest pressed against his stomach and her head against his chest. Baek's arms hung limply at his sides, no longer able to support himself, held in position by Jun's strong embrace, his eyes glued on the curvature of her rear over her back, stupid and trembling.

Jun slid her body over his, the feeling cold and slimy, the ink of her form smearing over his skin, causing him to groan half in pleasure and half in revulsion. Every fibre of his earthly being wanted her, needed her, burned for her, but his mind was trapped in horror, feeling violated and disgusted, frightened by this woman and yet knowing inherently that she was indeed his Jun Kazama. He felt as if he were about to cry.

"Jun…Jun…"

She silenced his despair with her mouth, her lips crashing into his in a fierce, passionate kiss. Baek's heart stopped in his chest, his body exploding with icy fire, his mind shattering like glass as the levee holding his instincts at bay cracked and split, reason drowning under the torrent of instincts and emotions that rushed forth.

Her lips felt like hot oil, tasted like blood and flowers, her breath tinged with lavender-scented death. He found her grip on his shoulders too tight, could feel bruises forming like splats of cloud on his skin, burning up with incandescent fever, her lips on his for a burning infinity.

He felt the vicious tug of her hands pulling off his shirt, exposing his arms and torso to her attacks, his body already coated in smarmy purple, her hands desperately spreading over his form, exciting him further with sickening, inhuman touches. He fell back, hitting the floor with a thud, groaning in pain and yet the woman above made no move to consider him. The old Jun would fuss and caress, ensure everything was well and tended with sweet whispers and butterfly kisses, but this Jun did no such thing, continuing her invasion of his body by sitting atop of him, straddling him with a fervent look of hunger that he had never seen upon her face before.

Her movements were a blur of purple in the dark, only her eyes in contrast with the gloom, amber and burning, frightening and mesmerising. Baek could not think, only stare back into those eyes, _her_ eyes, yet so fundamentally _not_ hers. Amidst the mixed sensations of pleasure and repulsion, her hands tearing frantically at the hem of his trousers, every part of him wanted her and yet did not. He felt sick, violated, but it was not from the act, but from her face, her personage. She wasn't the same, she wasn't his Jun and her rampant, fierce sexuality was terrifying for that fact.

Yet he found his hands on her arms, found himself pulling her down into him, his hands spreading out across the sensuous curves of her back, fingering her spine, holding the flesh of her intoxicating thighs in his hands. Her mouth was all over his neck, her hair in his eyes and nose. He felt himself cry out as her hands returned to their desperate fumbling at his trousers, felt the brief coldness then the heat of her flushed and panting body spill over him in a hot wave that caused him to cry out in the darkness.

He felt her envelope him with a burning fire he had never experienced before, felt his head roll back and reason completely vanish. All around with the blur of purple and black, with the flashing of her eyes swanning between carmine yellow and bright red, the gleam of her teeth, the feathers of her hair; her bodily ooze coating him in sticky coldness that sent shudders of repugnance through his body in conjunction with the heat between their legs. He could barely make her out, rocking over him, his hands so tight on the base of her spine that his arms burned as she moved back with frightening violence.

It was as if he were mad, as if she was a monster violating his very core with mockery and none of it was truly real. She bucked and writhed over him with inhuman grunts and a hysterical repetition of his name, like silk and daggers in his ears, her body joined to his so sick and pleasurable. He couldn't tell if it was really happening or if he had truly lost it.

Everything blurred, burned, melted, waxed and waned. Forever he felt his body moving with hers, could feel burning pain down his chest, between his legs. He felt his throat tear open in a blood-filled cry of desperate pain and horror and need, wanting everything to make it stop, but wanting it to go on when he caught the heavily accented face of her, his Jun, amidst the torrent of colour and feeling and noise above him.

He was a traitor, betraying the delicate and soft love of former years, here with her, with this monstrous metamorphosed effigy of his one and only.

She ripped the air with her voice, the scream like glass shattering in the air. He felt himself fall into the abyss at her command, his voice melting into hers with a cry of pleasure and pain, desire and disgust. His rapture lasted for what felt like eons, a blur of burning pleasure such as he had never experienced blanking his mind, filling it with visions of florid oil and buttery lights, feeling it with every part of his body.

The crescendo faded slowly, melting away like candle wax, leaving him a trembling wreck, shuddering and gasping for air, suddenly aware that he could barely breathe. All over he felt pain, tinged with the traces of otherworldly pleasure that pricked his nerves; the gunk of his lover's body coated him as if he were a creature like her. Jun lay on top of him, but she was not panting or exhausted, simply resting atop of him, her legs tight at his thighs, her cold body pressed against him, breath barely there between her teeth.

The visage before his eyes as he stared up at the now distant ceiling of the living room was of eerie faces glaring down with wicked smiles, the howl of wolves in his ear, imagination bordering on reality. As he blinked the world turned yellow. He felt so sick, still so terrified and now caught up in that most peculiar of human emotion after sexual release, suddenly drowning in a special kind of petite mort; his desire to cry washing over him again.

"Baek?"

There was a sickening feeling of guilt and despair in his gut at her voice, now the voice of his Jun, the one he knew. Trembling, he raised his head from the floor to find his lover looking up at him with soft eyes, her chin resting on her folded arms.

"Do you hate me?"

He swallowed and found his throat abnormally dry, continuing to look at her without words. She smiled and shook her head; her smile was sweet.

"I am sorry, Baek," she rose with inhuman grace, her spine twisting and breasts heaving and again Baek found himself completely enraptured by her terrifying beauty, "If you do, I understand. I am not the Jun you remember."

Still he did not speak, completely dumbfounded in the afterglow of their union, despairing and light and still so frightened by her. Though it was obvious she did not wish him harm, he could not shake it, could not remove the feelings of dissimilarity that filled the room with a stuffy presence. She was so changed he could not stand it.

Yet still he was happy to have her again, in a way.

She regarded him with those bizarre yellow eyes behind heavy lids, beautiful lips pursed. The look was Jun's, the Jun he remembered and he couldn't help smiling. She leaned down again, like water, coming to rest her lips against his in a tender and loving kiss, the spark of long cherished memories bursting through the fog of confusion, fear and shame like rays of warm sunlight. There was the imaginary sound of birdsong in his ears and had it not been for Jun's natural physiognomy, he would have thought it cliché. She pulled away again, movements deliberate and slow, thoughtful and filled with sudden heaviness.

"One day we'll meet again, but for now…I hope you won't hate me."

Her whispered words were in that delicate lilt that he adored, her heart laced through every word like ribbons. His chest constricted with the memory of her and for a moment the woman he was looking up at was not the yellow-eyed and oil-stained spectre wearing Jun's skin, but Jun herself, wrapped in light with blackbirds at her thighs and eyes as brown as warm earth; he felt the tears he had been fighting back spring forward, tracing rivers down the sides of his face.

"I love you Baek, even…even as _this_," her arms whisked in the air, the tendrils parting like smoke in the air, "Nothing will ever change that part of me that you love, the Jun you remember. I love you."

Her words were thick with grief, with endeared, desperate love and adoration, her voice trembling past the water that masked her voice, breaking through the unknown that masked her being in her sepulchral existence, confirming that at her depth, at her core, she was Jun Kazama, his love forever and always.

She smiled sadly, folding upon herself, her tussled hair swayed over her eyes, skin bright with an ivory glow in the dark, "This is where I leave you Baek, again."

He simply lay on the floor where he was, naked and trembling, watching her with desperate eyes and feeling his heart compress with that familiar desperation that always accompanied their partings.

"I wish things had been different."

His voice was barely audible, the words spoken revealing all the hurt and pain and longing that existed for the duration of their relationship, alive and dead. Jun simply inclined her head with closed eyes, frown at her porcelain lips, "I do too," she whispered.

He did not move as she vanished, simply turning her back to him with a look of regret, her gait slow and sure as she took slow steps into the ether, fading away like smoke in the air, her body every bit the same as the smoke and oil that clung to her naked form. Baek would often wonder why he made no movement to stop her, to hold her again or speak more words to her. He would wonder why their meeting in this place, their inky and frantic union, contained so little words, so little time. He figured it was due to his fear and shame, which, despite knowing her to be Jun, persisted, weighing him down with immense pressure and thoughtlessness, but he also suspected that it simply was not to be.

They had brief moments of happiness, brief moments of pure love and joy in their otherwise miserable, complicated lives, but they were not destined for happiness, for growing old together and living life side by side like the lucky couples did, no, they were tangled in webs beyond comprehension, trapped by machinations that neither wished to be a part of, but altogether helplessly tied to regardless of desire. Baek had come to accept this. Throughout the pain, the grief, the despair, he had resigned to this knowledge and finally came to accept it.

The tears finally came, thick and fast, a hot torrent against his cold skin. His body was racked with pain, both physical and spiritual and he consigned himself to anguish, that even after finally letting her go, she would continue to haunt him, except it was no longer with the glowing face of her sweet memory aching his heart was sadness and longing, but the fierce yellow eyes of a thinly-veiled siren, invading his body with inhuman feeling, wearing her face and speaking from behind the shroud of death.

In the late morning, with the sun warm through the blinds of the windows, a drowsy Hwoarang found his Master slumped against the far wall of the room, clothes and hair tussled, haggard and slumbering in awkward and troubled sleep. He woke the elder Korean with a concerned nudge and look, commenting what a state he was in.

Baek assured the younger Korean that everything was fine, he was alright, had simply fallen asleep whilst thinking. Hwoarang accepted this, though expressed curiosity as to the state of his attire, referring to his tousled shirt and the rip in his waistcoat; Baek wrote it off as not being able to remember.

He knew Hwoarang was upfront about all curiosities, so Baek would often wonder afterward why the younger man seemed not to notice the ink that stained the floors and walls of the room with faint lilac.


End file.
